Frontier outposts and sectors

[Gromak]

Can i build frontier outposts and hand them over to sectors?? They cost no influence for the sector? Isnt that a BIG exploit?

[Mistfox]

There was a German guy on previously, he carved out a huge empire early on with outposts and locked out every other faction from the map. He posted it on the forums and it has already been noted by the developers.

[Gromak]

So its a bug/exploit or spamming outposts for your sectors working as intended?

[TCPippin]

Sector mechanic is FILLED with exploits, so yeah, most likely a bug.

[Mistfox]

Exploit, not bug. Bug is an error, exploit is something working as intended taken by someone and ..well...exploited.. to gain an advantage. Big difference. One is an error in coding, the other is someone making the best of life. :)

[mike21munns]

Don't forget the influence costs, even though you can trade them to a sector to avoid the montly maintenance costs you still need the static influence amount and even with a good doctrine and pumping out either mining stations or research stations to satisfy your doctrine you cant "spam" them in such a mannor to totally block other empires.

[TCPippin]

What you also can do is give away to sectors control of the planets that require an upgrade of the main building. Normally, it costs influence to do so, but for sector-members it's free

[Gromov]

Originally posted by mike21munns:

Don't forget the influence costs, even though you can trade them to a sector to avoid the montly maintenance costs you still need the static influence amount and even with a good doctrine and pumping out either mining stations or research stations to satisfy your doctrine you cant "spam" them in such a mannor to totally block other empires.

The very idea was that handing them to sectors avoids the Influence maintenance.

[Overread]

This might be half and half. Considering how early on its hard to earn much in influence and even later into the game you can easily come up with only a tiny trickle. So I can see logic behind sectors removing the influence cost and thus letting you have some kind of stable and increasing influence gain to build with.

However on the flipside it does seem to be abusing the system.

Personally I think the sector management needs review. At present it feels clunky You can't expand without using sectors; but at the same time buliding up worlds is done best manually with micro - and 10-20 worlds isn't too hard for a human to manage at once in a game of this nature. But you can't manage more than 5 at a time - and (esp if you've got slow reproducing people) it can take a long while to get the needed population to allow you to expand a world manually so you have to use sectors otherwise you'll get overtaken in empire size.


At present it feels this area and that of influence is a bit clunky and not as streamlined as other areas of the game .

[dimm_ddr]

@Overread but you can manually micromanage all sector planet, whats wrong with that? I hear about bug where sector governer rebuild something when he shouldn't do this, but it's a bug, not sector mechanic fault.

[Overread]

dimm - you can only set a general policy for sector management; you can't micro control each world and what it builds; only set a general overall option for all the worlds in a group.

It's clunky because you might get one world rich in minerals and another rich in research but if they wind up in the same area you might have to sector them together; but the sector management will only allow for a focus of one type.

In general the planets and resource options are such that this game doesn't really lend itself to a single world having a very dedicated focus unless its a very barren world in terms of resource tile content.I feel as if a better method would be to allow us to set a rough policy for each world within a sector or to adjust how many worlds we can directly control.


The way I see it sectors are well setup for late game and large empires where you only need general input; whilst they are poor for early to mid-game where the player has enough time to dedicated to planet micro and where resource gains or losses are a bigger issue and thus micro is more appealing to the player.


At present the only way to do that is to keep cycling worlds in and out of sectors to manage them dirctly whilst setting sectors to not perform any management changes (or at least to be uanble to change established building types once they are put down) .

[Gromak]

Originally posted by Overread:

dimm - you can only set a general policy for sector management; you can't micro control each world and what it builds; only set a general overall option for all the worlds in a group.

It's clunky because you might get one world rich in minerals and another rich in research but if they wind up in the same area you might have to sector them together; but the sector management will only allow for a focus of one type.

In general the planets and resource options are such that this game doesn't really lend itself to a single world having a very dedicated focus unless its a very barren world in terms of resource tile content.I feel as if a better method would be to allow us to set a rough policy for each world within a sector or to adjust how many worlds we can directly control.


The way I see it sectors are well setup for late game and large empires where you only need general input; whilst they are poor for early to mid-game where the player has enough time to dedicated to planet micro and where resource gains or losses are a bigger issue and thus micro is more appealing to the player.


At present the only way to do that is to keep cycling worlds in and out of sectors to manage them dirctly whilst setting sectors to not perform any management changes (or at least to be uanble to change established building types once they are put down) .

But if one planet is rich in minerals and another rich in research, if you set sectors to respect tile bonuses they should build mines on the mineral rich planet and research stations in the other planet.. technically at least

[Overread]

True, but any spare resource pockets might mean that they build bonus structures for the resource type they are set for. Granted that the resource and planet building is pretty simple so its not impossible for the AI to have basic control; I just feel that sectors would be easier to manage at a planet level rather than global level. To my mind the global level is great if you've got dozens of worlds - yes by all means then you need sector management and automation.

[Scourge012]

I'm pretty late game now (about 250 years in and my tech is now Equivalent to the Fallen Empires...at least that's what the diplomacy screen says...). I must say I really like the sector management. I have 450+ pops of all different species and over 100 worlds. Just managing the 7 core worlds I have plus the 9 sectors is driving me crazy.

I'd hate to try to OCD manage all my worlds with them all spamming me about unemployment or upgrade this or that.

I've started to treat Sectors as flexible planets. Kinda like in a city builder you have to be okay demolishing structures you built two hours ago to meet the needs of the large planned community you just created. If a place is pumping out good research, but it's potential is not as good as another sector that's younger, I just switch specialties, seed both sectors minerals and off they go, replacing those pesky blank tiles with whatever I told them to do.

They key is tossing them MINERALS more than energy. Once they clear the tiles, they don't need a reserve of energy. In fact all my sectors have hit the energy cap, as has my empire it self.

[ElanaAhova]

Originally posted by dimm_ddr:

@Overread but you can manually micromanage all sector planet, whats wrong with that? I hear about bug where sector governer rebuild something when he shouldn't do this, but it's a bug, not sector mechanic fault.

Your governor did not do exactly as you (the overlord) wanted? Like governors not following the President, or Senators flipping the eagle to the PArty chamber leader. Oh my, thats real life. LOL :) We don't fully control tacticl battles either. .

[Overread]

Originally posted by spezio.frances:

Originally posted by dimm_ddr:

@Overread but you can manually micromanage all sector planet, whats wrong with that? I hear about bug where sector governer rebuild something when he shouldn't do this, but it's a bug, not sector mechanic fault.

Your governor did not do exactly as you (the overlord) wanted? Like governors not following the President, or Senators flipping the eagle to the PArty chamber leader. Oh my, thats real life. LOL :) We don't fully control tacticl battles either. .

*insert witty if crass comment on how Hitler was allowed to control tactical battles in the war-room - even though he oft made bad choices*

Goveners might not do exactly what you want; but at the same time I can still put a group of planets under a sector and have them not build anything by simply manually building worlds up myself prior to sectoring them. However this is impractical game-speed wise.

I totally get that the game isn't supposed to be full micro and I'm not angling to end up with it becoming so micro it ends up like Distant Worlds (which has so much micro that you basically are slaved to automation in many cases). However I feel that the sector controls and setup could be improved to allow for more control over the automation.




Some of the tactical elements also sound like they need adjustment; fleets auto attacking or setting bad target priorities as not a feature so much as just poor automatoin that is showing gaps. Generals most certianly do as they are told unless they have superior ideas and get wins - generals who keep getting losses tend to die (and this game you die pretty quick